Arguably, Canada can complain about whatever they want (according to their laws), that affects a company that hopes to do business in their country. The US prohibits American companies from selling weapons to it's enemies. By your logic, this transaction, which takes place outside of the US, is none of their business. But you had better believe they make it their business.
Google is free to tell Canada to shove off... if Google doesn't want to do business in Canada anymore. And it's in Canada's best interests to protect their citizens' intellectual property both locally and abroad.
There's nothing "absurd" about this decision. Canada has said that this must be the case if Google does business there. There's a huge issue with people's notions that no country should be able to regulate Google's behavior. The nature of them being an international corporation should not mean they are immune to everyone's laws.
Rather than an international corporation being subject to nobody's laws: International corporations should be required to follow all of them.
> The US prohibits American companies from selling
> weapons...
Yes, but this is actually instructive. Google is not a Canadian company, so the more accurate comparison would be the US trying to control who the Russian Kalashnikov Concern sells AK-47's to, just because they're also for sale in the US.
> The nature of them being an international
> corporation should not mean they are immune
> to everyone's laws.
Nobody's advocating that the likes of Google should be immune to everyone's laws, but rather that it's overstepping that any given country is going beyond just instructing an international corporation on how to behave within their borders.
> International corporations should be required
> to follow all of them.
So if Saudia Arabia decides that showing any images of women more revealing than the niqab in Google Images that should be applied globally? This is just a recipe for a race to the bottom.
There's realistically no limit to what a country can require if an international company wants to do business within their borders. Surely, Saudi Arabia could make that requirement, and then Google would need to decide whether or not it wanted to comply, or stop doing business in Saudi Arabia.
Presumably, in your example they would likely pull out of Saudi Arabia, given the scope of the impact on everyone else versus their income from Saudi Arabia. In this case, Canada has ordered one search result, so Google obviously is going to comply rather than losing the Canadian market (and it's three offices there).
Countries have no inherent requirement to make it easy for international businesses to operate, and I don't feel they should. They should be looking out for their citizens first and foremost, and that's exactly what Canada did here.
A lot of people would be better off. Few to no international companies could be found totally innocent of tax dodging schemes and the like.
But rather, my point is: If a company wants to do business in multiple countries, they are going to have to obey multiple countries laws. Nobody's required to do business globally, and no country is required to enable it.
And if the threat of losing access to Google search is such a risk that a country would need to capitulate to a corporation's demands, it would only be more evidence for the need to bust that monopoly up.
Google is free to tell Canada to shove off... if Google doesn't want to do business in Canada anymore. And it's in Canada's best interests to protect their citizens' intellectual property both locally and abroad.
There's nothing "absurd" about this decision. Canada has said that this must be the case if Google does business there. There's a huge issue with people's notions that no country should be able to regulate Google's behavior. The nature of them being an international corporation should not mean they are immune to everyone's laws.
Rather than an international corporation being subject to nobody's laws: International corporations should be required to follow all of them.